Monday, July 15, 2013

Claiming Your True Identity After Awakening

CLAIMING YOUR TRUE IDENTITYAFTER AWAKENING

I worked with a very charming, professorial type of guy from Australia this morning. He's someone who's been around a long time and knows a number of people in our community. One thing he didn't know--at least not through direct experience--was his own true identity. I like to say of that situation that the only thing we're missing is the only thing that counts!

Happily, my friend came to consciously know his true nature, what we often term as "waking up," just over an hour after we first met each other in a Direct Pointing Session. One of the last bits of advice I gave him was the same advice I offered to the young English weightlifter who woke up with me yesterday, and most of the other dozen or so people who came to know themselves in DPS sessions since I wrote the last long post. This advice is one of the most crucial tools I can give to those who wake up in my sessions, whether the awakening has been world shattering or subtle.

For the record, I've had a couple of "misses," too, but I go through the very same process with every client. It's a living process, an organic method, so it changes itself to suit the participant. I sau "changes itself" because I don't do it, none of it. I show up, that's my part of it. And of course I get the money and the credit, which is great. Such a deal!

But what actually happens is completely out of my hands, even the effect of what I'm presently suggesting. In every session I deliver everything that is deliverable to that "address." Occasionally, just like the postman, I find myself at what looks like the wrong door. Of course it never really is the wrong door, but it can sure feel like it is, to both the client and to me. In those cases, clients take what they see as theirs, what they see as valuable, if anything at all, and leave the rest. A partial result, or no result at all, is not anyone's "fault." It's just What Is. It's not wrong, or a mistake, it's simply how the happening is happening right now, how it's happening until it isn't. You've probably noticed that things don't stay the same forever. Everything is in flux.

Truth knows no favorites: absolute equality is the standard. Everyone on the planet has the raw potential for Self-realization at every moment of every day. This is hard to accept, but I promise you that it's true. When we're ready, we "get it". When we're ready, we can't not get it! Some are closer than others. Some are a lot closer than others. A heavy percentage of the people who are drawn to me are simply frustrated and tired out, and that tiring has made them ready. A worn-out ego is more apt to become a compliant ego. It's more likely to take a nap for at least a little while, allowing the children to play play at Direct Pointing, but it seldom naps forever.

More often than not, even a tired ego gradually rebuilds and reestablishes itself as the arbiter of reality. I would say that oscillation is the rule in these things, and I can't even recall a sure, pure exception. I, for example, was in oscillation for a mere 3 1/2 years! I was still cloudy for another 18 months after that. I had no teacher until I'd been awake a long time. Early on I had no idea that there was anything like a "typical path" that we go through once we've taken that first giant step and find ourselves no longer seekers, but rather finders, for however the sense of that initial awakening may last. The awakening itself never goes anywhere. We do! And yes, there is a "typical" path.

Part of the typical path is buying the myth that awakening is the end of the road, as I did back in 2006. If you do that, you will be just as disappointed as I was. Here is the embarrassing truth of my own awakening. I believed with all my heart that no one could have ever been here before.I was willing to grudgingly give the benefit of the doubt to perhaps Buddha, and maybe Eckhart Tolle, who was my idol at the time, but probably no one else who had ever existed. This astonishing arrogance is often present in what I will term "brilliant" awakenings. We think we've got it all, and we think it'll last forever. We don't, and it doesn't.

There are certainly degrees of clarity that are unleashed upon an initial awakening; I promise you that. It's quite subjective on my part as to who's experiencing what, but I nonetheless see varying degrees of of cloud-cover every day in both Direct Pointing Sessions and Clarity Sessions. It's just weather, mind you A sense of cloudy awakeness, or startlingly clear awakeness, by the reckoning of the human unit, are still both arisings. See the opposites: cloudy and clear? If you are seeing opposites, you are looking at the dream, from within the dream. In everyday language, we are "asleep." By that I mean that we are unconsciously awake versus consciously awake to the dream.

Unity is the truth of things. Diversity, all these lovely arisings, including the one we wrongly think we are, appear within unity. Awakening is typically both an event and a process. After the event of our first sight of truth, we then go, if we are open and willing enough, through the process of moving toward abidance and embodiment. But neither one of those things is likely to be present for quite a while. That's the bad news. The good news is that you won't care! It's not like we ever graduate. We open forever, and so long as we go with the flow of what is, we'll enjoy every step. If we find ourselves thinking we should be more awake than we are, that we should right now be as clear as that time we can almost remember, then we can be assured we are looking at the dream from within the dream.

So let's get back to this prize advice of mine. What is it that may be the single most critical thing we can do to spur the awakening process? Claim our True Identity. I capitalize that here to make it absolutely clear what it is that I'm talking about. Back in the days when I was a seeker, I could hardly wait for the seeker to wake up--I wanted Fred to wake up so badly. The only problem with that notion is that it's never going to happen. Never. To anyone. Including you, the one reading this right now.

Asking a human unit to wake up is not very different from asking a bowling ball or a paper towel to wake up. These bodies are not nearly so different from those things as we like to think. Now, having said that, let me say that on one hand the human body is a simply marvelous, miraculous object. I'm absolutely crazy about mine, and my wife's too, for that matter. But they're both objects. In the apparent absence of that which inhabits and animates the body, it is of a good deal less value than either a bowling ball or a paper towel! In fact, once the animation leaves the body, we have to bury it, or burn it, and pretty quickly, or it'll start to stink and make us sick, too!

It's that which inhabits and animates the body that does the waking up thing. Life, Tao, God, Brahman, Great Spirit, Holy Spirit, just Spirit, Consciousness, Awareness, Awakeness, Being, Tom, Ted, or Sue (whatever it is that you want to name and call that ineffable essence which both contains and simultaneously is every last arising--from proton, to elephant, to the more obvious living-verbing of a sunset or rainbow) is what wakes up to the dream of the personal self. It wakes up to the dream of selfing. It wakes up to the arising, the event, the pattern that we call Fredness or you-ness.

In that moment of awakening, whether it has the background of an LSD-type experience, an emotional roller coaster of tears and laughter, or the simple, "Oh!" of recognition-at-long-last, we know ourselves to be the un-One Thing. I say "un-One" because oneness, while being a handy label that I use quite a bit in my teaching, is not the truth. It points toward the truth of un-One, Advaita, not-two. I like to use new terms that are not so loaded with history, terms that we are not so sure about. That's one of the reasons I use the "sense of being" rather than Being in my sessions work. Keeping ego just a little off-balance, a little unsure, is a good thing. In Nonduality, doubt is our friend.

In apparent oscillation--there can be no real oscillation--we slip back into thinking we are the little me, the body-mind. We again mistake that little me to be our true identity, and so experience a sense of lostness, often of desperation, even dire mental pain--because I had something holy and then I lost it. It was here, and then it left. How do I get that back? I must get that great feeling, understanding, peace, what have you; I must get that back.

So, what we are doing is giving up our credentials as a finder, and picking back up our credentials as a seeker. We are right back on the seeking train, only we're riding in a better cabin car. I suggest instead that you claim your True Identity while you are awake. I'll ask people, "You know you're awake, right?" They answer affirmatively. "Do you need to call anyone to verify that for you, or do you know this to be true beyond a doubt." They know it to be absolutely true, and need no outside confirmation, not even mine. The experience is self-confirming. I even lead people through some of the traditional Nondual pointers to see how those pointers line up with their own current experience. I want there to be no room for doubt later that I somehow hypnotized them into believing they were awake when they were not. In this case, doubt is not our friend!

Once we see the truth of our own experience, why not accept that the truth is that our True Identity is that of the not-something, not-nothing, No-thing that holds, fills, and is the universe? We want to claim that identity, whether we are cloudy or clear. If we will make the unalterable decision that I am This, whatever in the world This is, whatever shape it has currently taken on, both when I can see/be it, and also when I cannot see/be it, I have given myself a huge leg up in the clearing process.

Vote for your own experience ofWhat Is, not what your mind says about What Is. Why backslide into the well-worn lie? Because that's the easiest thing to do, that's why.

The dream is incredibly detailed, and incredibly sticky. In my case, I had thought myself to be this Fredness for so long, and the path there was soknown, so clear, even if it included loads of known suffering--it was either that or the unknown. I was not yet ready to live in the unknown. Few if any of us are, not all in one shot. Both clarity, and the willingness that clarity spawns, come gradually. I had no teacher until after I had long been awake, and it took me damn near forever to wake up. But that was only according to the unit's perspective. According to the vastness, it took however long it took--who cares?

We can only bite off what we can bite off at any given time. How much we bite off is essentially insignificant. What matters is that we bite, and then hang on like snapping turtles--those creatures that won't let go until it thunders, as the old tales tell us. Let us hang onto our experience, and let our thinking do whatever it wants. Even if we believe ourselves to be the unit, if we had any sort of genuine clarity there will be a little piece of us that knows. There will be a part of us that knows that things don't really work like they appear to work. We may even remember that things work exactly 180 degrees away from how we think, but we just can't remember quite how it was that it all looked.

Ego will soon enough re-present itself as an "unbiased observer" of the Way Things Are, which is code for how things could, should or would be if we lived in a world where what we think about What Is actually counts. Clearly we do not.If you are in an argument with What Is, you are in the dream. If you are in an argument what What Is, you are insane. Come back, come back, come back to the sanity of knowing that there is only What Is, and that outside of imagination, there never were, are, or are going to be any alternatives to What Is. We go with it suffering and leaving claw marks behind us, or we go with it peacefully, perhaps even joyfully, but we are going to go with it regardless. In the end, What Is rules. But only always.

So, if you have a so-called awakening experience, if you come to discover who you really are, my invitation to you is to accept what you've found as exactly what it is: the truth. In this way you can dump seeking, or as I like to call it--re-seeking--right here and now and begin the new journey toward greater and greater clarity. You are now working from awakeness, as awakeness without resistance. More clarity will show up much sooner. I'm not saying this is always easy, but I can say that it always works. Claim your identity.Clouds, or no clouds, the sun is always shining, my friends. It never goes anywhere, we can't actually lose it, and it's always, always shining. You are that sun, the very light of the world.

"FRED, I STARTED READING THE BOOK OF UNDOING this morning and had an awakening to reality, my true nature/space, hard to describe, feels phony to put into words. I have never had this intense of a breakthrough and I have done just about every thing under the sun for years and years. man this is awesome!*~Pete Castellano, Tucson, AZ[*See Pete's full letter on The Book of Undoing page.]

"WHILE READING THIS BOOK I had my first glimpse of "It"! I finally have experienced it for myself. That experience has given me a new level of peace and gratitude."

~Mary Leary

"IF YOU ARE LOOKING FOR A CLEARand concise book on radical nonduality, this is on "my" must-read list."~Yaakov Litman

"THIS BOOK UNDID ME! I don't expect the world will ever look quite the same again. Don't think about it...don't let yourself be distracted from this opportunity, just read this book now!"~Laurk

"SO MANY BOOKS leave the reader lost in the words, but this one actually takes you beyond the words and shows you how to "find it", what the experience of "it" is, and what happens to "it" when imagination starts to dance again. One cannot help but discover the real nature of what we are. These are the same goals of many similar books, but this one actually succeeds in taking the reader there."~K. A. Popko, Wisconsin"FIRST OF ALL, WONDERFUL POINTING in The Book of Undoing!!! Love it; going through it again. Less is more and I feel you've hit the mark in this definitive book. Bravo!" ~Anthony Wedge, Mt. Pleasant MI"FOR THE EXHAUSTED spiritual seeker this book is dynamite. It literally blows your mind."~William C. Wright, North Pomfret, VT"FINISHED BEYOND RECOVERY and immediately dove into this one. I can't say enough about the energy and vividness that Mr. Davis brings to Inquiry. I would read anything he wrote." ~Wallace Chapman, Portland, Oregon

"STEP BY STEP, Fred takes apart delusion,and confusion, leaving behind clear knowing. In this moment, anyway. No guarantees for tomorrow - present understanding is all that counts."~Tom Barron, East Tennessee

"I DEVOURED THE BOOK OF UNDOING and it has provided an abiding dissolution of ego since I read it. Great work. Highly recommended. READ THIS BOOK."~Jess C,Atlanta, GA

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BEYOND RECOVERY

"THIS IS A WONDERFUL BOOK. Fred Davis is steeped in the knowledge of nonduality, and this text is marvelously written for those in or out of Twelve Step programs. Clear, intelligent, well written and lots of fun to read!"

"BRAVO TO FRED FOR WRITING WITH SUCH CLARITY. I hope 12 steppers reading this review really get the delicious paradox of that and find themselves picking up this book. Addiction tends to keep us seeking, even if we are seeking recovery. Fred's book has the ability to really bring the timeless wisdom that freedom is in the here and now into the 12 step movement. Great book. I loved it."~SCOTT KILOBY,author, Natural Rest for Addiction: A Revolutionary Way to Recover through Presence."IF THE TRUE MEASURE OF A BOOK is to be found in the perfume that remains behind when all the words have been forgotten then, for Beyond Recovery, it is this quality of honesty, openness and surrender which communicates itself in the words and between them, administering not just to the mind but to the background of Awareness."~RUPERT SPIRAauthor, Presence: The Art of Peace and Happiness"THIS BOOK BY FRED DAVIS extends the culture of [Twelve Step Recovery] and contributes to the current shift in Western civilization, which is one from attending to religion, philosophy, art, history, music, and science as pointers to our true nature, to true nature itself. In other words, it is a shift toward attending to attention, or to the one attending, rather than to the creative outcomes of that kind of attention."~JERRY KATZ, editor, One: Essential Writings on Nonduality

"I SEE THAT THERE IS A CERTAIN MAGICto your word-smithing - it comes directly from reality and points powerfully to reality... it seems to move like a flood tide that raises a heavy form off the rocks and gently settles it in a peaceful ebb-tide of being..."~James Waite,Creator and Editor, Nonduality Living"AGAIN, I WANT TO SAY your writing is amazing. It's very engaging, personable, and smooth. When a book on non-duality feels like a page-turner, that's quite an accomplishment!"~Shanti Einolander, Creator and Editor, ONE: The Magazine

The Living Method of Awakening is an extraordinarily successful process of inquiry, investigation, and direct pointing that encourages immediate recognition of our shared True Nature. Hundreds of people on six continents have found the door to freedom using The Living Method.

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